TechYob

Went along to an interesting panel discussion about the future of TV and the internet hosted by AIMIA.  My take is that P2P will be to content as broadcast was to TV.  When the medium is the internet, P2P is hands down the most efficient and scalable way of using ’spectrum’ (bandwidth).  Of all the speakers I found myself nodding more often than not when Phil Morle waxed lyrical on the subject. 

Sydney is a small eco system in the startup world and got talking with Marty of Tangler fame about the importance of instituting a customer development cycle as part of the ethos of every Oz tech startup.  The basic concept is that you dont scale your sales and marketing before you have established a repeatable sales process.  To do this you need to have a rigorous set of gates, just as you would for developing your product, which you use to filter your business idea or product concept. 

One last mention goes out to Rob and Nick who are developing a remarkable sports oriented online channel 3eep.  Sound plan, great team.  These are the kind of guys that News and the TV channels need to be getting behind otherwise they will find the train will have already left the station when their panopoly over free to air TV inevitably looses steam. 

Thanks to our sponsors at Hadron & Castle, the Moet and Mullets were out in force last Sunday.  Good to see the art of the reach-around continues to be perfected.   

Darius Coveney, Ex CFO of Adelaide security startup Dtex and fellow HAAS Alumni is now heading to New York to keep Macquarie Bank’s Finances in order.  It seams the barbarians are storming the gates, and if lives up to his namesake, you’ll meet no smoother a battering ram than Mr Coveney.          

For those who missed out, STIRR Sydney was a great place to hang out and meet other entrepreneurs that are kickin-A from Oz.  Hats off to Mick from Tangler for organising and Mike Zimmerman from TVP for stumping up some cash to make it possible. 

It seams to me that Australian web entrepreneurs are coming of age and are understanding the power of the subtle sell.  Gone are the days of the elevator pitch, and the enthusiastic bleating of blue-sky boasts.  Everything is either in uber-stealth-mode or private alpha. To such an extent that one VC complained that instead of being courted, most of the startups at the event were happy to leave them to their own devices. 

Is this the start of a shake-out in the Oz venture capital industry? 

Hardly. It just reflects two important shifts

1. Right-sizing.  People are more willing to do the hard yards to boot strap their products.  VC used to be the way that ego-entrepreneurs bank-rolled a pay rise. 
2. The economics of the exit.  If your exit is 5 million with 3 people in 2 years, the numbers just dont add up. 

The event itself showed we have come a long way in Oz since Internet 1.0 First Tuesday pitch-fests.

The tonge-in-cheek rendition of the halfbacked.com game was a highlight. Essentially groups choose two random words and build a dotcom business plan and pitch in 15 minutes.  Mike Cannon-Brookes’ group took the prize with its Shoewave.com business for social tagging of odd socks.  The founder of Atlassian (and an event sponsor) had tough competition from Bananasmell.com’s rhinoplasty locator mashup and videoparachute.com’s air-delivery video service. 

The real prize of the night however, goes to Remember the Milk’s online task management for collecting the most votes for best Web 2.0 Demo.  As soon as I work out how to get it for my Google sidebar, it’ll become a permanent feature of my personal productivity suite.  Which reminds me, Chris Saad from Touchstone sent me a new Alpha download to try out. 

Ill be profiling these guys and other great Tech.Startup.Oz companies in the near future.